Miltown

“[popular magazine articles] suggest that Miltown and the tranquilizers offered a treatment for the crisis of masculinity . . . tranquilizers answered the questions [Do you think a wife’s place is in the home?] with the precision of science, restoring a 1950s version of marital love while returning the mother to her rightful place in the home and in bed as if a conjugal-strength Mickey Finn. . . . tranquilizers promised to restore a man’s mastery of his own home and his sense of tranquility with it (Metzl, 107). . . . In a historical sense, tranquilizers thus became treatments for clearly psychoanalytic problems . . . Not only, however, did the notion of a bodily anxiety ablate the possibility that symptoms could return from the repressed – it ablated the repressed altogether. . . biological psychiatry treated the symptoms and deconstructed the diagnostic system that defined them (108). . . . Popular print sources thus suggest that the rejection of psychoanalysis, and the embrace of Miltown, in magazines such as Newsweek, Time, and Cosmopolitan, was based on something more than one clinical model replacing another. Also at state, and even more so in these articles, was the embrace of a new model for talking about a specifically gendered perception of ‘cultural’ problems. . . . [it] presented a new means of justifying what Rosalind Minsky might call patriarchal unrest. . . . Chemical change then brought housewives in from the cold and rendered psychotic mothers suddenly able to perform their motherly duties. . . Offering a replacement for psychoanalysis both as a clinical mode of treatment and as a discursive system, biology thus posited a ready response to the social crisis implied in Newsweek’s search for sanity. . . . Psychoanalysis offered a beautifully conceptualized diagnosis without hope of immediate alleviation. In psychopharmacology, however, Newsweek found its cure” (111).